Rain-swollen river destroys Haitian town / At least 2,000 dead; aid work prevented by washed-out roads

Tim Weiner, New York Times

Published
4:00 am PDT, Saturday, May 29, 2004

2004-05-29 04:00:00 PDT Mapou, Haiti -- Mapou is gone. So are a thousand people who lived here.

This was a town with outlying hamlets where perhaps 10,000 lived, or endured. They scratched a living from the earth, down in a green valley in the southeast corner of Haiti, amid the deepest poverty of the Western world.

On Monday, "the rain started falling so hard, it was like the flood in the Bible," said Fernando Gueren, a farmer who lost his parents and his son in the deluge.

The river that runs through Mapou drowned the town Tuesday. On Wednesday, U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Duane Perry flew into the valley in a helicopter after delivering aid to another devastated town, Fond Verrettes.

He looked down at a muddy lake with a few rooftops poking through its shallows and said, "It looks like there was a town there."

That lake was Mapou. The town was under 25 feet of water, Perry said. The dead hung from the trees.

Standing amid tons of rice he helped carry to Mapou on Friday, he said the village elders had told him that at least 300 people were dead and that 700 more had vanished and were feared drowned. "We estimate about 1,000 dead" in Mapou, Perry said.

If so, Mapou is the most devastated place among the many damaged and destroyed in the floods that killed perhaps 2,000 people in Haiti this week.

That toll remains an estimate and may remain so for days. What is now becoming clear is that "the magnitude of the disaster is much worse than we expected, with many, many more people affected," said Guy Gauvreau, director of the U.N. World Food Program in Haiti, who brought the rice, water and cooking oil that reached Mapou in an American helicopter Friday.

"There are many other places around here, many towns, we know nothing about," he said. These towns and hamlets, home to thousands of Haitians, remain cut off from the world by mudslides. It may take days more to reach them and tally their losses.

In Mapou, hundreds of survivors waited patiently to pick up a sack of rice, a jug of cooking oil, a bottle of water -- their faces masked in sorrow, hunger and dread. They said that almost everything they owned, and many they loved, were gone.

"My family's all dead," said Pedro Nisson, 28, a traditional healer. "When the rains came, the people tried to flee to the hills, but the water drove them back."

The waters that swallowed the town had receded Friday, but it still stood 10 feet deep. The crops, chiefly corn, are destroyed. The goats and pigs have drowned. The wells are poisoned with corpses. Epidemics are likely, aid workers said.

The torrent washed out all the roads that connected the villages to the capital, Port-au-Prince, where aid agencies warehouse their food. There is no chance that the roads can be repaired for weeks, maybe months, said Gauvreau, as he surveyed the wreckage of Mapou.

The gap between the aid that is being delivered now and the aid that is needed is enormous, he said. "Here in Mapou, we planned aid for 1,000 families, but 3,000 families are affected," he said, figuring on five people to a family.

In all, some 75,000 people in and around Mapou and Fond Verrettes, two of the hardest-hit Haitian towns, face "a continuing food emergency" for months to come, he said.

Fourteen helicopters of the American-led international military force that occupied Haiti after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled under U.S. pressure Feb. 29 are now the lifeline for those tens of thousands of hungry, homeless villagers.

Almost all those helicopters belong to the U.S. military, which President Bush has said will leave Haiti in June after a mission intended to restore a measure of stability to the country.

Many of the more than 300 confirmed dead in the Dominican Republic border town of Jimani were Haitians fleeing poverty. Jimani's shacks were eradicated by a 100-yard-wide torrent, now a blank dry slash through the town. Little relief appeared to have reached Jimani as of Friday morning.

There may be worse to come in Haiti as the spring rains continue, and soldiers and aid workers struggle to reach still-lost villages with their small fleet of helicopters, and by running rivers on rubber dinghies.